Oh the early days of the internet. When the only games you had on your phone were snake or bowling and using the internet on your brick cost $500 per second. For me, the internet has always been around.
My brother and I would walk home from school when I was in 3rd grade and be home alone until about 5:30 when my dad got home from work. So much freedom, so little supervision. We always had a ritual: drop all of our stuff in a pile in the mudroom, grab a ton of snacks, argue over who gets the den computer and who's stuck with the laptop (ours had that awful little eraser head of a mouse in the middle of the keyboard), then we'd just sit there for hours playing solitaire with windows media player in the background putting us into a hallucinatory trance. Sometimes we'd switch it up and do a little spaceman pinball or minesweeper. Which by the way, minesweeper has rules and they are very straightforward!!
I think it was 4th or 5th grade that AIM kind of exploded everywhere and we were catapulted into this beyond rapidly growing information technology age - and puberty! Fun stuff.
What's funny to me is honestly the amount of people (*cough cough* EDUCATORS *cough*) who ended up eating their words. "You won't have access to a calculator in your back pocket." "You won't be able to look things up." Like boy how wrong were you?! I mean, I could go on about how the education system needs to be more fluid and able to adapt and change with the access, and how the internet is making each subsequent generation grow up faster and faster, and how the rise of this information age where we're more connected to others now than ever has so many people feeling so completely isolated, but there simply are not enough hours in the day.
So yeah, nostalgia is great and so much has changed. But have we grown up to do exactly the same things we've always been doing, home for ours without supervision but just replaced solitaire and minesweeper with scrolling Instagram and TikTok?
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